Audio tracks

Concept

City Frequencies was an audiovisual performance held in May 2000 at the Melbourne Town Hall as part of the Next Wave Festival 2000. The performance created an immersive environment using the sights and sounds of the Melbourne CBD as source material.

Every sound and image used in City Frequencies was sampled from within the city of Melbourne. Using these sounds and images the project aimed to show the impact of social life within a physical area. New insights were explored regarding relationships between sound, image and our environment.

City Frequencies featured sonic collages, atmospheres, urban soundtracks and juxtapositions of visual resonance. The source material consisted of recordings of the people who live, work and thrive within the city of Melbourne, sampled across the entire audiovisual spectrum.

Sound acts not just as a metaphor for the ways in which people's actions within the city interact; it is a physical trace of these processes, left on our perceptible environment. We hoped that City Frequencies was an encouragement to awaken to the possibilities of this urban environment, discover new ways of seeing and hearing the city's rhythms and gain an awareness of its existence as a social organism.

The Next Wave Festival is an internationally acclaimed arts festival held every two years in Melbourne, focusing on new developments at the cutting edge of modern artistic practice, dedicated to nurturing a culture of contemporary ideas into the 21st century.

City Frequencies was formulated, coordinated and directed by Matt Adair and Nicholas Wilson, sound artists active in Melbourne's electronic and experimental music communities. The visual design was coordinated by Melbourne photographers Jeremy Dillon and Narelle Wilson, featuring their work along with the photography of Jane Adair and video from Dianne Janes.